A primary way to learn about your patients is to get to know their values, for values are the essential keys to personality structures. Without being fully aware of it, psychotherapists deal with the intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic values of their patients all of the time. The basic concepts of psychotherapy, e.g., those relating to therapeutic goals and means to ends, are value-laden concepts. Therapists need to know both what patients value and how they value. The Hartman Value Profile is an effective instrument for knowing such things. It tells us directly about the structure of a person’s values and indirectly about the structure of a person’s personality. It has been extensively validated using the very best validation methodologies.

FOUR LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. To understand better how values are relevant to psychotherapy, its key concepts, its goals, and its therapeutic methods.

2. To understand better the distinction between intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic values (what is valued) and valuations (how something is valued) and how each of these has a place in psychotherapy.

3. To understand better that and how the personalities and behaviors of patients are structured around what and how they value.

4. To learn about the Hartman Value Profile (HVP) as a powerful tool for measuring the value structure of patients’ personalities, how their values are linked to the character traits and behaviors of concern to psychotherapists, and the usefulness of the HVP in diagnosis, therapy, and measuring therapeutic progress.

MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS (Correct answers are in bold.)

1. Intrinsic values are

a. means to ends,

b. ends in themselves,

c. elements of a system,

d. all of the above.

2. Values are present in

a. therapeutic goals,

b. therapeutic techniques,

c. therapeutic theories,

d. all of the above.

3. Valuations are

a. what we value,

b. who we value,

c. how we value,

d. all of the above.

4. The “Hierarchy of Value” affirms that

a. people are more valuable than things,

b. ideas and beliefs are more valuable than people,

c. things are more valuable than ideas of things,

d. people are less valuable than things.

5. The first part of the Hartman Value Profile asks people to rank 18 items

a. from most pleasant to least pleasant,

b. from most self-centered to least self-centered,

c. from best to worst,

d. from least pro-social to most pro-social.

BIOGRAPHY OF AUTHORS

See final page.

KNOWING PATIENTS THROUGH THEIR VALUES

“Know thyself,” admonished the Oracle at Delphi. This is good advice, and people who do not need psychotherapy do know themselves to a significant degree. People who do need psychotherapy have many shortcomings, and one of the most fundamental is their failure to know themselves – to understand various aspects of themselves and how these factors interact. Thus, one basic objective of psychotherapy must be to help patients know themselves. “Know thy patients” is also essential advice for therapists, who must have insight into their patients’ needs. If they do not know their patients, therapists cannot build upon their strengths, identify their weaknesses and shortcomings, or apply therapeutic strategies to help them.

Therapists get to know their patients most commonly through clinical interviews, discussions during therapy, observing their physical behaviors, analyzing their verbal behaviors, noting responses to particular psychotropic medications, applying and interpreting personality tests or profiles, reviewing records, and listening to what other people say about them. No one approach is sufficient unto itself, and each makes an important contribution.

This discussion is about getting to know patients by getting to know their values through a systematic approach called formal axiology (from “axios,” the Greek word for “values”). Most patients would not know how to answer if asked about their values. A direct approach is likely to be fruitless, yet therapists deal with patient values all the time. The values of patients structure their inner personalities and external responses. Because therapists talk a different language, partly technical, and may not always be fully aware that values are embedded within that language, they may not be fully cognizant of constantly dealing with human values.

The Study of Values

Historically in the field of psychology, there have been limited approaches to attempting to tap into the valuational aspects of personality. Not very much attention has been focused on values, per se, that is, as an area that might be delineated and examined. More often psychologists have studied the attitudes, interests, and behaviors that are expositions of value, but these do not in themselves reveal value systems and structures. Valuational development, like moral development, has been addressed to some degree in developmental psychology and education.

German philosopher and psychologist Eduard Spranger (1882-1963) believed that personality could best be understood by studying a person’s values. In the 1920s he conceptualized six “Types of Men” based on his study and reflection on human motivation. His categories were Theoretical, Economic, Aesthetic, Social, Political, and Religious. Psychologist Gordon Allport was one of his students, and he expanded on Spranger’s thinking. He and Philip Vernon formulated the first values test in 1931 called “The Study of Values.” It was based on Spranger’s theoretical framework. Gardner Lindzey helped with later revisions; thus, the instrument is known as the “Allport, Vernon, Lindzey Study of Values” (Allport, et al., 1951, Allport 1968).

Perhaps the most significant work in psychology on values was done by Milton Rokeach, who published The Nature of Values in 1973 in which he discusses the construction of the Rokeach Value Survey. This volume is a very well thought out presentation about values and attitudes. He identified two types of values, terminal and instrumental. Terminal values are end states or outcomes such as a comfortable life, freedom, self respect, wisdom, etc. Instrumental values are processes and modes used to achieve desirable end states (terminal values). They include such things as ambition, honesty, imagination, and intellectual responsibility. Rokeach saw “values” as the concept that could unify apparently diverse areas concerned with human behavior (Rokeach 1973, 1968).

Two prominent developmental psychologists of the 20th century contributed to the values picture through their concepts of how children develop moral awareness and how they learn to express values.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980), a Swiss psychologist, and his student, Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987), studied children’s behavior. Piaget was the first to take children’s thinking seriously, theorizing that cognitive development is sequential through four stages of growth. The last, at about age 15, represents the integration of learning and experience, as expressed in value application and decision making. Kohlberg elaborated on Piaget’s work, postulating his own theory of stages of moral development. He determined that gaining moral maturity takes longer and is more gradual than Piaget believed. Both recognized that qualitative changes that occur as cognitive and moral reasoning develop lead to changes in the way information and experiences are processed and contribute to the development of the capacity to make value judgments (Eysenk and Arnold 1972, Kassin 1995-2004, Kohlberg 1981).

Lastly in this brief review is Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), who established the theory of the “Hierarchy of Needs.” He believed that we are motivated to satisfy certain needs in our lives and that lower needs must be met before higher needs can be fulfilled. The Hierarchy has five levels, ranging from lower order to higher order values that, when fulfilled, result in being a “fully actualized human,” in his terminology (Gwynne 1997).

The above are all phenomenological and descriptive approaches to values, as are almost all other available resources, rather than scientific and theoretically based approaches. Various instruments are available for use in counseling, consulting, and business that purport to measure values, but they are also fall into the same category. They study the products of the process of valuation rather than the underlying value structure and system. They leave us with a situation analogous to treating the symptoms instead of addressing the causes of a disease; this works to some extent, but it is lacking in really correcting a condition. Let us now examine an approach that probes the underlying value system.

Values, Valuations, and Good Things

For this presentation, let’s begin with some explanations about values and the approach we are suggesting, which is based on the work of Robert S. Hartman. All of us, including therapists, have norms or standards by which we measure successes and failures. Therapists apply norms or standards to themselves and to their patients in determining their own professional successes and failures. “Help,” “therapy,” “cure,” “health,” “adaptation,” “maturation,” “relief,” “growth,” “normal,” “pro-social,” “realistic,” “respect,” “self-respect,” “acceptance,” “ego ideal,” “goals,” “objectives,” “well-being,” “patient interests,” “rational autonomy,” “sanity,” “risk,” “disorder,” their opposites, and almost all professional words in the vocabularies of psychotherapists are value-laden words or concepts. Values are an integral part of their very meaning; they all involve measuring their intentional objects by norms or standards.

According to highly plausible philosophical definitions, “value objects” are just the entities to which we apply norms or standards, “valuation” is the activity that involves measuring things by appropriate norms or standards, and “valuable or good things” are those that “measure up” or “fulfill their norms or standards” (Hartman, 1967). All psychotherapeutic processes and activities have goals or objectives (value objects), and norms or standards are applied (valuation, which may hereafter be called “evaluation”) in determining whether and the degree to which these objectives are met. A good or successful therapeutic strategy is one that achieves therapy’s objectives by bringing about valued objects like self-esteem, realistic self-knowledge, pro-social behaviors, personal growth and maturation, rational autonomy, self-control, responsibility, and freedom from disturbing and debilitating problems in living.

If human personalities are structured around values, then knowing these values is the essential key to understanding human personalities, whether “normal” or “abnormal.” This claim might seem unpromising at first to therapists because they assume that we have no way to measure and rationally order human values or to link personality traits and behaviors to them. Shortly, we will introduce a powerful, efficient, and effective way to do such things. It will be obvious hereafter that our thinking has been deeply influenced by a former philosophical colleague and mentor, Robert S. Hartman, now deceased.

Three Basic Kinds or Dimensions of Human Values and evaluations

Not all human values and evaluations are exactly alike or on a par. Philosophers and others have traditionally recognized at least two basic kinds of value objects, intrinsic values and extrinsic values; and Robert S. Hartman recognized and identified a neglected (but still pervasive) third kind of value object, systemic values. Hartman also identified normal or normative human responses to or evaluations of these value objects.

Hartman made an important and illuminating distinction between what we value–values or value objects, and how we value–valuations. We should try to be as clear as possible about the differences between values (what we value) and evaluations (how we value), and we can profit from what Hartman had to say about such things.

Three Kinds of Good or Valuable Things–Value Objects (What We Value)

If we ask, “What things are good?,” we must recognize at least three basic kinds or dimensions of goodness or value. As identified by Hartman, the three elemental kinds of valuable things are:

(2) Extrinsic Values, (E): tangible things, processes, actions, or roles located and observable in our common world of space and time that are actual or potential means to ends.

Examples: physical objects and processes, bodies, books, houses, cars, human actions and behaviors, and social relations, roles, and conventions, social groups, and established institutions.

(3) Intrinsic Values, (I): things that have value in, of, and for themselves; things that should be evaluated intrinsically because they are ends in themselves, desirable or valuable for their own sakes.

Examples: unique centers of conscious experience, choice, thought, and evaluation such as human persons, non-human animals, and God–according to Hartman. Other philosophers suggest that the pleasures of human intercourse, the enjoyment of beautiful objects, knowledge and/or its pursuit, pleasure or happiness as such, freedom, dutifulness, desire fulfillment, etc., are intrinsically good; but such things exist only within the lives of those unique conscious individuals (like us) who exist for themselves. They are good-making properties that enrich the lives of unique conscious individuals.

Three Kinds of Valuation (How We Value)

From the very beginning, people have attached value to things in many different ways. All evaluations include cognitive or mental elements, i.e., value standards or concepts by which objects of value are measured. Evaluations involve cognitive judgments by persons about objects of value, judgments that valued objects measure up to standards, or that they fail to do so to some degree. The good ones measure up; the fair, average, poor, and bad ones do not, or they do so only by degrees. Evaluation also includes feelings, affections, emotions, and desires that range on a continuum from minimal (systemic), through ordinary (extrinsic), to maximal (intrinsic) personal involvement.

(1) Systemic Valuations, (S): dispassionate, “objective,” or “cold and calculating” feelings and judgments, as well as black or white, all or nothing, oversimplifying judgments.

(3) Intrinsic Valuations, (I): complete self-identification with valued objects; intense personal involvement with, concentration upon, or investment in value objects; judgments of identification, totality, wholeness, and uniqueness. This kind of evaluation includes all the ways in which conscious individuals like us combine or unite ourselves totally, intensely, and passionately, (either positively or negatively), with objects of evaluation, so that distinctions between self and valued-other cease to matter or to be noticed, and “the subject/object distinction” is overcome or overwhelmed psychologically and valuationally.

Without going into it here in detail, negative systemic, extrinsic, and intrinsic disvalues and disvaluations, the opposites of the preceding positive values and valuations, must also be recognized. Also, anything can be evaluated in any dimension, as when some people relate only with detachment to other people, or treat other people as mere things, or relate with total intrinsic devotion and self-identification to material possessions or to ideological dogmas.

“Better than”and the Hierarchy of Values and Valuations

Hartman offered a formal definition of “better” to complement his formal definition of “good.” He wrote that “‘Richer in qualities’ is the definition of ‘better,’ ‘poorer in qualities’ is the definition of ‘worse'” (Hartman, 1967, p. 114). For clarity, we find it helpful to add “good-making” to this definition, especially since so many philosophers now use this terminology. Let’s define “better than” as “having more good-making properties than.” Given that definition, we can then ask if any of the above three dimensions of value and evaluation are better than any of the others. The answer is definitely affirmative.

Hartman’s “Hierarchy of Value” affirms that intrinsic values are better than extrinsic values, and extrinsic values are better than systemic values.

Given this formal definition of “better than,” intrinsic values have more good-making properties than extrinsic values, and extrinsic values have more good-making properties than systemic values. In application, this means that people have more good-making properties than mere things, and real things and people have more good-making properties than mere ideas of things or of people. Our value priorities, our hierarchy of value, should thus put people first, things second, and ideas of or about people and things third. Many if not most serious human moral problems arise from assuming that people are less valuable than things or beliefs, or from valuing only a few people intrinsically but not everyone.

Systemic, Extrinsic, and Intrinsic Values and Valuations in Psychotherapy

The principal concerns and goals of psychotherapy all fall under the rubric of one or more of these three kinds of value and evaluation. Each of the many “schools” of psychotherapy may stress its own distinctive values and evaluations, but they tend to hold many general goals in common. They differ mainly in their explanations of the causes of psychiatric problems and, most importantly for present purposes, in the therapeutic strategies they employ to reach their goals, but not in the goals themselves. Some examples might help.

“Cognitive scripts” that people run through their minds are systemic values, and helping patients to run realistic and pro-social scripts through their minds is a significant systemic therapeutic value, goal, or objective of most psychotherapy. On a moral level, if people repeatedly run violent and vengeful scripts through their heads, they are likely to feel and act violently and vengefully. Cognitive scripts are involved in psychological self-esteem, so how and what people think of themselves is of great therapeutic significance. Some people run negative cognitive scripts about themselves constantly through their minds, fill themselves with anxiety and self-doubt, and make themselves feel insecure, inadequate, inferior, depressed, threatened, or suicidal. By contrast, narcissistic individuals overvalue themselves with unrealistic ego-inflated scripts of grandeur and superiority, and when these systemic self-images are challenged, they feel defensive, threatened, angry, or shamed (Martens, 2005). But how should they value themselves cognitively or systemically in order to have a “healthy” self-image? Cognitive psychologists tell us that how we think definitely affects how we feel. By changing and controlling how we think about self, others, world events, and conceptual beliefs, we can change and control how we feel about such things. Sadly, many people don’t realize this until someone else, e.g., their therapist, tells them!

External or bodily behaviors directed toward themselves, others, things, institutions, ideologies, etc., are extrinsic values. They are means to ends beyond themselves. Are your patients well behaved, or misbehaved? Do they “act out” in ways that injure, degrade, or destroy themselves, other people, property, the environment, or universal human ideals? If so, for what troublesome ends or goals? Are their extrinsic values pro- or anti-self, anti-social, anti-material, anti-environmental, anti-ideological, or what? Are the means they employ to achieve their ends effective or ineffective? Do they value other people so little, or disvalue them so much, that they are excessively aggressive or downright violent batterers or abusers? If your patients are the victims of others with such anti-person values, how do you help them to live in a world that has such people in it? What values or disvalues motivate abusers and victims? What more “constructive” values are you trying to get them to adopt? To what extent is your therapy concerned with the extrinsic values and disvalues of your patients, e.g., with means to their sometimes questionable, or sometimes more desirable, ends, or with their fixation on things and social status? Are your patients excessively involved with the pursuit of high social status, i.e., with overvalued “superiority,” and, if so, at what costs to themselves and other people? What ends do prosperity, possessions, and high status serve, or do your patients regard them as ends in themselves? Or are your patients too little concerned with their own social connections? Do they attach too little value to their own place in society, thus being prone to social apathy, withdrawal, and isolation? What counts as a “realistic” concern with prosperity, possessions, and social standing?

Do you try to help your patients value themselves and other people in the very best way possible? If so, is that the systemic way of detachment or dissociation, or the extrinsic way of “normal” everyday involvement and caution, or the intrinsic way of empathy, love, intense personal identification, and caregiving? Or is it all of the above in harmony or balance in their proper place? Patients who attach too little intrinsic worth to themselves have too little self-esteem and suffer all of the consequent social and personal liabilities. Do extremely anti-social, alienated, withdrawn, and negligently-social patients attach too little intrinsic worth to other people? What value correctives do you envision for and offer to such patients? To what standards or norms of correct or proper pro-social behavior do you or should you appeal in answering such questions? How do you measure such things?

Are the personalities of at least some of your patients organized globally in such a way that systemic values are dominant and overvalued? Are some of your patients dogmatists, ideologists, potential terrorists, “ivory tower intellectuals,” or authoritarians who have comparatively little sensitivity to the extrinsic worth of physical or social things and processes and/or to the intrinsic worth of unique persons in their full concreteness. Are they all too ready to sacrifice property, personal relations, and persons themselves for the sake of ideological or dogmatic “truths”? Or do they instead under-value and under-use their cognitive capacities, thus forfeiting all the help such capacities could give them in solving their problems, mastering their occupations, improving their interpersonal relations, living more morally and abundantly, understanding their situations in life, finding meaning, and controlling their destinies?

Are some of your patients predominately oriented extrinsically? Are they almost completely absorbed in the material or sensory world and/or in the pursuit of social power, control, or dominance? Are they too thoroughly “worldly,” as the theologians might say, or too “commonsensical” and “down to earth,” as they might view themselves, in their values? Are they so focused on instrumental “practical” values that they have little understanding of or appreciation for intellectual systemic and personal intrinsic values? Are they comparatively insensitive or indifferent to the value of thoughts and ideas, and/or to the value of people as unique centers of conscious experience, activity, evaluation, and value? If so, what should you do to help them? What goals for them should the “helping professions” promote? If your patients overvalue or undervalue observable things and behaviors in ways that create serious problems in living for them, what would it be like for them to properly value things and activities that make life worthwhile? What would it be like to get it just right, to neither overvalue nor undervalue the extrinsic? To what hierarchy of values and evaluations do you appeal in answering such questions? What should the priorities of your patients be? What should your own value priorities be?

Comparatively speaking, are some of your patients excessively intrinsic, dwelling too much, too sentimentally, romantically, or narcissistically on intrinsic values (e.g., “my beloved,” or “my absolute uniqueness”), while they neglect their systemic cognitive and extrinsic practical capacities, or while they intrinsically evaluate only themselves? Are they intrinsic “love slobs,” desperate to be loved, but unable or unwilling to give it? Or do they undervalue the intrinsic altogether and consistently fail or refuse to respect either themselves or other people as ends in themselves? Are they so extremely antisocial and psychopathic that they do not even need the approval of others and are devoid of intrinsic valuational capacities like empathy, conscience, and remorse? Do they fail to love others as themselves because they do not love themselves? Do they devalue others because they devalue themselves? What global value-restructuring of their personalities do you envision and prescribe for intrinsic over- or under- valuers? In helping your patients therapeutically to re-create themselves, what values and evaluations should have priority over others. To what hierarchy of value priorities do you appeal?

Introducing the Hartman Value Profile

A profiling instrument is available that we believe can be of immense help to psychotherapists in dealing with the preceding value-laden issues. It is an easy and quick-to-use personality profile that yields deeply insightful results (although learning to score and interpret it correctly are not easy and quick). It is not a “psychological” profile at all in any traditional sense of the term; rather, it is a value profile, an “axiological” profile, that gets at people’s personalities by getting at their values and how they rank or order them. If values are the real keys to human personalities, as Robert S. Hartman believed, his profile, the Hartman Value Profile, goes right to the heart of the matter. If administered at the outset, it can answer many of your troublesome value questions about patients before your very first extended interview with them. Many readers may be acquainted already with the Hartman Value Profile (HVP), but we will try to introduce it to those who are not. Although Hartman’s work and the HVP have been around for some time, interest and momentum have been greatly on the increase recently. Of necessity, this introduction must be only a short beginning, not the whole story.

Robert S. Hartman realized that systemic, extrinsic, and intrinsic values and valuations can be combined with one another in many different ways, that some of these combinations enhance or increase value (e.g., milk chocolate and nuts), and that other combinations decrease, degrade, or destroy value (e.g., milk chocolate and motor oil). The HVP consists of two parts; each contains eighteen paired value-combination items; nine are positive and nine are negative. Three basic entities or types of value, intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic, can be positively and negatively combined with one another in eighteen logically possible ways. In each paired value combination item, one value or evaluation either enhances or diminishes overall value when it is combined with the other value. For example, in the item “Love of nature” in Part I, intrinsic loving enhances the value of extrinsic nature. In Part II, the item “My work makes me unhappy,” disvalued extrinsic work diminishes the value of an intrinsic “me” or person.

Those taking the profile are asked to rank eighteen items from best to worst by assigning the numbers “1” through “18” to each item on each part of the profile. The nine positive, desirable, or good items consist of three intrinsic values or valuations, three extrinsic values or valuations, and three systemic values or valuations combined positively or constructively with others; the same logical distribution exists for the nine negative, disvalue, undesirable, or bad items. A person’s rankings are compared to the theoretical norm, generating scores that may then be interpreted psychologically.

Individual persons will actually rank the eighteen items from “best” to “worst” in an incredibly diverse number of ways, but just how they rank them discloses their most basic personality structures and value systems. Most people finish the Profile, both parts, in twenty minutes or less, so it affords therapists an opportunity to gain an enormous amount of information about patients, or people in general, in a very short amount of time.

The Hartman Value Profile is copyrighted by the Robert S. Hartman Institute for Formal and Applied Axiology. (See https://www.hartmaninstitute.org.) Currently it is used extensively in business consulting, but its application in psychotherapy also affords rich results. Scoring and interpreting the HVP are somewhat complicated, but these are explained in its Manual of Interpretation (Hartman, 1973). Scoring the HVP yields 57 interpretive score scales (Hartman, 1973, p. 1), some of which are much more revealing than others. What was once done laboriously by hand can now be done almost instantaneously with computers, and today most consultants and therapists who use the HVP have their own scoring/interpreting software or have affiliated with distributors who supply it to them. When properly scored and interpreted the results can be extremely significant in diagnosing a person’s psychological and behavioral strengths and weaknesses. It can pinpoint serious problems in living, aid immensely in planning a therapeutic regimen, and measure therapeutic progress with repeated applications over time.

Readers are referred to a 2005 publication by clinical psychologist Leon Pomeroy entitled The New Science of Axiological Psychology (Pomeroy, 2005) for detailed studies that support the HVP as a valid clinical instrument. Pomeroy, now retired, spent most of his career as a clinical psychologist at a Veterans Administration Hospital in New York City. His work there was combined with an appreciable private clinical practice. Over the years he administered the HVP to hundreds of patients having problems in living, and with a variety of psychiatric diagnoses. He also administered the HVP to hundreds of college students in many countries, to general medicine patients, and to various other comparison populations. In this book, he both validates the HVP and provides a preliminary exploration of its clinical, consulting, and other professional uses; and he invites replication and expansion of his results by other qualified investigators. His work aims at integrating psychology and value theory and demonstrating the HVP’s efficacy. It provides very fruitful insights into the possibility of finding and measuring universally valid basic human values like the “Hierarchy of Value.”

The scales of the HVP most directly measure a person’s overall value sensitivity, including his or her abilities to distinguish between different kinds of value, to have a sense of proportion about them, to see and solve value problems, to distinguish between good and bad, and to discern, differentiate between, and prioritize values in individuals, in the world, and in systems (Hartman, 1973, pp. 1-2). In turn, all of these value capacities can be and in fact are with good evidence correlated with a vast array of personality and behavioral traits. Hartman himself did it originally through his own profound personal knowledge of and insight into human nature and individuals, as expressed in both his theory of values in the Structure of Value (Hartman, 1967) and in his Manual of Interpretation (Hartman, 1973). Pomeroy does it by drawing upon his years of clinical experience as a professional psychologist and through employing the standard validation methodologies that are developed and applied extensively in his book.

Conclusion

We have attempted to focus on the role of values in psychotherapy as key elements in revealing who and what we are as well as who and what our patients are. When we are able to move beyond historical and phenomenological reflections on value and can discern a person’s deep value structure, as measured by the Hartman Value Profile, a wealth of therapeutic information and possibilities become available. Our hope is that the emerging area of Axiological Psychology will provide significant new resources for effective psychotherapeutic interventions.

Rokeach, M. (1973). The nature of human values. New York: The Free Press.

About the Authors

Rem B. Edwards, Ph.D., is Lindsay Young Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN. He is Secretary/Treasurer and member of the Board of Directors of the Robert S. Hartman Institute for Formal and Applied Axiology. He has published over seventy articles and reviews, and seventeen books, including Ethics of Psychiatry, Prometheus Books, 1997. While teaching at the University of Tennessee he established and supervised a practicum in ethical issues in mental health care for graduate students in medical ethics at Lakeshore Mental Health Institute, Knoxville. He has applied axiological value theory to issues in religion in his Religious Values and Valuations, Paidia Press, 2000 and in Developing Your Spiritual Potentials: The Christian and Religious Value Profiles, Xlibris, 2005–co-authored with David Mefford, Ph.D. and Vera Mefford, M.A. His book on cosmology, What Caused the Big Bang?, Editions Rodopi, 2001, was selected as the “2001 Book of the Year” by the Editors of the Value Inquiry Book Series. Edwards also did extensive editorial work on Leon Pomeroy’s The New Science of Axiological Psychology, Editions Rodopi, 2005.

Arthur R. Ellis, Ph.D., is a Licensed Professional Counselor who has been a clinician since 1971. He holds degrees in psychology (B.S.) and rehabilitation counseling (M.S.) from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and counseling (Ph.D.) from LaSalle University. Since 1976, he has worked in the Psychology Service of a Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He studied formal axiology under Robert S. Hartman, who personally trained him in the use and interpretation of the “Hartman Value Profile.” His research includes exploring the value patterns of alcoholics. He has been an active member of the R. S. Hartman Institute for Formal and Applied Axiology, serving on the Board of Directors, holding the positions of Chairman, Executive Director, and President, and being recognized as a Fellow of the Institute. In 1994, Robert S. Hartman’s autobiographical manuscript, Freedom to Live, was edited for publication by Dr. Ellis. Another extensive manuscript of Dr. Hartman’s, The Knowledge of Good: A Critique of Axiological Reason, was published in 2002 with Ellis and Dr. Rem B. Edwards as editors. Dr. Ellis is a Master Addictions Counselor, a Diplomate of the American Psychotherapy Association, and a Professional Member of the American Mental Health Counselors Association.

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